The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Wednesday, November 27, 2013

I hate the term Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS).
Of course a parent can do and say things that encourage children to feel
alienated from the other parent (just as
a parent can do or say things that alienate children from himself or herself).
Children can be alienated to a greater or lesser degree by many factors, and I
would hazard the guess that all children at all times have some preference for
one parent over the other, although the preference may change with age and
events. When parents separate or divorce, it would be virtuous for both of them
to remember what they used to like about the other parent, and to encourage the
children to maintain a positive relationship. Some people do the opposite, but their actions
and the children’s responses are not part of a “syndrome”, a term that tries to
sound as if there is solid scientific evidence behind the use of the PAS label.

A lot of people other than myself have also rejected
the PAS concept. As a result, instead of accusing a divorcing co-parent of
causing the children’s alienation, there may be an accusation of failing to
promote the children’s relationship with the other parent. When the accused
parent denies that this was the case, the conclusion may be that he or she is “in
denial” and must go into therapy in order to acknowledge the actions and
understand the reason for them. It may be ruled that until this is
accomplished, there can be little or no contact with the children.( I am
wondering, by the way, whether a request that the other parent have supervised
rather than unsupervised visitation may be enough to trigger the accusation.)

This does not leave much of an option for a person
who actually did not fail to promote the relationship, does it?

I have in mind two cases that almost exactly
followed this pattern, and one other that has some similarities. All are cases
where a parent denies having done what she is accused of (they all happen to be
“she”), and is sent for therapy to enable her to “confess”, and, I suppose, be
shriven. If she really did wrong, of course, this speaks badly for her
character, so she should not have much contact; if she says she didn’t, that
means she’s lying, confused,or mentally ill, so again she should not have much
contact. To be accused is to be convicted, it would appear.

In one case in Canada, the parents separated when
the children were about one and two years old. The mother asked for supervised visitation
with the father, who sought the help of a psychotherapy group. Father’s attorney claimed Parental Alienation
Syndrome and full custody was given to the father, with the order that mother must
undergo psychotherapy in order to acknowledge her alienating behavior and treat
whatever problem caused it. Until this is done she is not to have contact with
the children, nor may her parents see them. Mother denies having caused
alienation and argues that if the children are alienated, it is father’s own
behavior that has done this. The costs of psychotherapy are in any case impossible
for her to pay.

In a second case in the U.S., the parents separated
when the children were almost two and almost 4, following revelations of father’s
use of prostitutes. Father did not want to divorce. Mother asked for supervised
visitation because father had allowed one child to play with an electronic
device on which father had downloaded pornography. Mother took the children to
her family’s home in Canada, while father petitioned a U.S court for custody.
Mother has just been told that custody is to be given to the father because she
failed to promote the father-child relationship during the separation, and that
she must go into therapy so she can acknowledge and work through the problem. The
children must go to their father by Jan. 1, giving them one month to prepare
for this major change. If mother stays where she is, she may see the children
once a month and Skype with them every other day (a decision that ignores the
usual recommendation for overnights equivalent in number to the child’s age in
years); if she follows the court’s directive and also moves to the father’s
chosen city, she may have 50/50 custody. She denies that she failed to promote
the relationship.

The third case is different, and I have written
about it here before (http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2013/01/kafka-again-more-on-capture-of-child.html).
In this case, the mother asked a couple (the man being the father of one of her
children) to care for two preschoolers for some days. When she returned, the
couple refused to give them up. Years have passed in a legal battle over this
which has taken all of mother’s savings. The children have been in an
unconventional form of therapy and one is in residential treatment against mother’s
wishes. The therapists say, and the courts agree, that the mother must have
been abusive, because the children are in problematic mental health; nothing in
their early medical or educational records indicates this. The mother denies
that she was neglectful or abusive, and this is interpreted as evidence that
she must have been so. The plan at this point appears to be to terminate her
parental rights and to “free” one of the children for adoption by an as yet
unknown family.

Do all these cases remind anyone of anything? For
me, they are quite reminiscent of the Recovered Memory Therapy scandal of the ‘90s,
in which failure to remember sexual abuse was counted as evidence of abuse, as
heavily or more so than memories. Accused parents who denied abuse were also
told that they certainly could not see their children unless they confessed
their misdeeds; those who confessed falsely out of desperation (or were
convinced that their lack of memory meant they were guilty) could still not be
with the children and often lost their jobs and other resources as well.

It’s time that the courts dropped the ‘70s pop
psychology belief that denying something is evidence that it’s true. Honestly, life
isn’t all in our unconscious minds and motivations. And a reality-based request
for supervised visitation is not alienation, in any case.

Last weekend, my husband and I visited friends in
another state, a family that has one 9-year-old child, a boy adopted from Latin
America when he was 11 months old. On Monday morning, I saw an interesting
little scene: before young Phineas (which I’ll call him because it’s pretty obvious
that it isn’t his name) was about to leave for the school bus, his mother
called him to give goodbye kisses to my husband and me, because we were about
to go home, and then she wanted a hug and kiss for herself. Phineas came to her
and let her put her arms around him, but he turned his face away with a blank, withdrawn
expression and did not participate.

I was struck by the resemblance between Phineas’s
behavior and the failure to be affectionate “on the parent’s terms” that
proponents of Attachment Therapy regard as a symptom of Reactive Attachment Disorder (or of their
notional entity, Attachment Disorder). And of course there were various other
cherries that could be picked to build support for this diagnosis: separation
from the birth mother very early; care by a foster family, then separation from
them for placement with his adoptive parents. He even had to be told not to be
quite so rough with the dog on Sunday afternoon.

So,shall we jump to the conclusion that Phineas is a
sad case of RAD, or AD? Let me offer some alternative explanatory factors.

First, let me point out that nine is an age when
most children begin to look outward from the family and concern themselves less
with their parents and more with their peers. The hugs and kisses that they
used to like so much now become more formalized, except perhaps at bedtime.
Rough-and-tumble play is very much part of their lives, and they may need to be
reminded that pets don’t communicate in the same ways their friends do.

In addition, Phineas’s life has had some bumps in it
over the last two years. His developmental pathway had been very smooth in
every way, until two events occurred a couple of years ago. The first was that
his mother, who is a medical professional, developed an allergy to latex that was
of life-threatening proportions. If Phineas had touched rubber bands or latex balloons
and then touched her or kissed her, she had a reaction that required a visit to
the emergency room, often, of course, with Phineas in tow. Even a visit to a
store that had a display of latex balloons could do this, and Phineas became a
balloon-detecter, looking around him carefully as they entered each new place.
On a couple of occasions, balloons at Phineas’s school meant that his mother
had to leave quickly, and there was much correspondence as the mother asked
school staff to help her by excluding latex balloons . If the balloons were
there, she could not go to the school for classroom visits or parties or many of
the events other parents attended (and Phineas’s father’s job rarely gave him
the chance to do these things).

At that point, Phineas received a head injury in a
playground accident and suffered from post-concussion syndrome that continued
over more than a year. He could not tolerate loud noises or crowds, cried
easily, and was afraid of another blow to his head. His school attendance had
to be managed carefully. And of course this was all complicated by the fact
that his mother could not go with him to a doctor’s office unless she knew it
was latex-safe, so even his medical care had additional complications. (He also
had a medical problem involving a mass on a testicle, which fortunately
resolved without further treatment.)

Last summer, just as the effects of the concussion
finally seemed to be over, two elderly, much-loved members of the family died,
and Phineas’s maternal grandmother had two heart attacks. To help deal with
this, his mother went away for two weeks at a time to the neighboring state
where her mother lives, leaving Phineas with his father-- the best possible situation for him, but also
the first real separation he had had from her.

A week ago, Phineas’s school started a new
fund-raising project, making and selling necklaces made of stretchy
bands-- latex, of course. His mother
told him she would be fine if he did that as long as he changed his clothes
when he came home and put them in the washer so she did not have to touch them.
But on the school bus he had to sit next to a boy who tends to bully, and when
the boy pulled out his rubber bands, Phineas told him “don’t touch me with
those, I don’t want to get latex on me. It makes my mother sick. She might even
die.” The other child, not surprisingly for him, took this as provocation and
rubbed the bands all over Phineas’s shirt, saying “I’m killing your mother!”.
Phineas got off the bus in a storm of tears and told his mother “I don’t want
you to die! Please don’t die!”

A few days later, Phineas turned his head away when
his mother wanted to kiss him goodbye before he went to school. Do we have to
look to an attachment disorder to explain this? I think not! This child is
intensely attached to his mother, and not unrealistically afraid of losing her.
What can he possibly do to feel better about this? His only option is to try to
avoid the vulnerability he feels-- or at
least to try to act as if he isn’t vulnerable. To interpret this behavior as
meaning a lack of attachment would be absurd, and to attempt to treat it by
placing him in “therapeutic foster care” would simply exacerbate his fear.

Am I saying that there is no such thing as Reactive
Attachment Disorder? Not exactly; I think there are behaviors of quite young
children that stem from disturbed attachment relationships. But when we see
years of typical development, and then “aloofness” in family relationships, I
believe we do well to examine these in the context of all the child’s
experiences, both early and recent. Most contextual factors may not be as
obvious as they are in Phineas’s case, but they need to be searched for before
we assume that attachment is the problem.

Monday, November 18, 2013

When I was commenting on Kathryn Joyce’s Slate
article about the terrible life and death of Hana Williams last week, I was
struggling to think of a reason why adoptive parents would try to care for more
children, and more challenging children, than common sense would say anyone
could manage effectively. It’s clear, as Kathryn and other writers have
frequently pointed out, that fundamentalist Christian beliefs have often driven
the growth of “megafamilies”-- although
in cases like that of the Schultzes in Tennessee a few years ago, it was not God
but Mammon that was probably the motivating factor. Still, there are many
fundamentalist Christian families who have adopted some children, but stopped
while they were still in control of the situation-- so why do some go on and on? In my earlier
post, I speculated that there might be some form of emotional disturbance that
would create a powerful, anxiety-based drive for more and more children-- but even in talking about this, I realized
that I was trying to separate some aspects of megafamily adoption from
religious beliefs, in the hope of identifying some characteristic of potential adoptive
parents that could be used to keep their family size within manageable limits.

While reading about the Williams family, I noticed
particular statements about the adoptive parents’ emotional reactions to
pictures or information about come children--
that their hearts went out to Hana, for example. This stayed in my mind
as I went on to read a second article about a megafamily, or, as the author
Maggie Jones called it, a “supersize” family (www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/god-called-them-to-adopt-and-adopt-and-adopts.html?_r=0).
So far, I’m delighted to say, this family has not had a tragic history,
although the adopted children come from difficult histories of their own.

According to Jones, the adoptive mother of this
family “latched onto the idea of adopting from foster care after hearing an ad
on K-LOVE, a [Denver area] Christian
radio station, about a new organization… that was helping Christians adopt
foster kids… ‘Has God been calling you to adopt?’ the voice-over asked.” Jones
also noted that of “the dozens of evangelical and conservative Christian
parents I spoke to, many said that church sermons, Christian radio shows or
other Christian campaigns, including Focus on the Family’s national
foster-to-adopt program, pushed them to adopt.”

Why were these ads and sermons so effective?
Presumably, Christian adopters are not more susceptible to persuasion in a
general way than other people are—they don’t, I suppose, buy more from catalogs
or e-mail ads than most of us. Can it be that there is something in their
belief system that makes them more easily persuaded to adopt, and adopt more
and more? I think there are a couple of points of belief that do have this
impact.

One of the points is institutionalized to some
extent because of its appearance in the New Testament. James 1:27 tells
Christians to care for distressed orphans and widows. (As others have pointed
out, the widows seem to be getting pretty short shrift, but that’s a whole
different issue). The form that care should take is not described, and in the
past contributions to missionaries and orphanages were generally considered to put
a person in compliance with this admonition. Today, as Kathryn Joyce pointed
out in The child catchers, care for
orphans is conflated with the Great Commission of spreading the Gospel, and for
many the child’s conversion to Christianity is as important a goal as relieving
physical distress. (One can see why this is the case, given the belief system.)

A second point of belief has become part of one type
of Christian belief system over the last hundred years, in spite of the
rejection of this idea by mainstream churches. This is the belief that
miraculous events, of the types described in the Bible, can still occur today
for people who are committed to a system that is variously described as
charismatic or Pentecostal. Charismatic believers consider that they can
experience or carry out supernatural events like those described as occurring
for Jesus’ followers after his death. These include the ability to detect evil
spirits and to exorcise them-- an
ability to be expected after one is shown to be part of the system by “speaking
in tongues”.

Of the phenomena to be expected by a convinced
charismatic, a superlatively important one is to be spoken to by God, who will
indicate his wishes for a person. The K-LOVE ad literally referred to this: “Has
God been calling you to adopt?”

The idea of a direct message from God is a difficult
one for nonbelievers to understand, and this is partly because even when joking
about this we tend to think of a spoken message of the kind we would receive
from another person. Gary Trudeau made much of this idea several years ago in
showing his reporter Rick Redfern at a press conference where God spoke to the
person being interviewed-- but “only on
background. This was not for attribution.”

But charismatics do not necessarily expect a message
from God to come in the form of a voice they can hear. It is more likely to be
in the form of a “word of knowledge”. According to www.christcenteredmall.com/teachings/gifts/word-of-knowledge.htm,
a word of knowledge is “a definite conviction, impression, or knowing that
comes to you in a similitude (a mental picture), a dream, through a vision, or
by a Scripture that is quickened to you. It is supernatural insight or
understanding of circumstances, situations, problems, or a body of facts by
revelation; that is, without assistance by any human resource but solely by
divine aid.” If I understand this
definition, it means that a divine message could come in the form of
preoccupation with an idea or text, as well as by intense emotional responses
that are experienced as conviction. I don’t understand to what extent
self-editing or examination of conviction and impressions is acceptable, and to
what extent it would be considered as disobedience to the divine message. It
would seem, though, that all that is needed to identify a word of knowledge is
a sense of certainty-- or, in the title
of Pirandello’s play, Right You Are If You Think You Are.

Mr. and Mrs. Williams reported the sense that their “hearts
went out” when they saw Hana’s pre-adoption photograph. Did they identify this
experience as a word of knowledge or a divine command, I wonder? Similarly, the
family Maggie Jones wrote about, when they were reluctant to adopt more
children. received an e-mailed picture from an adoption caseworker, which they
said “pulled them in”. Did they too
identify as a divine message the
compassionate impulse that most of us feel toward children in trouble ? If so, perhaps
we have an explanation of why some adoptive parents do go on accumulating
children, sometimes with obviously tragic outcome, sometimes, perhaps, with
unknown impacts on the children and the adoptive parents themselves.

What should we do, then? Can we possibly ask
potential adoptive parents if they have charismatic beliefs that might affect
how they manage their families? No, of course not, and I don’t think even the most
militant atheist would care to countenance such a question and its influence on
adoption decisions. (Presumably most of us would not want free-thinking or any
other view of life to prevent us from adopting.)

However, we can limit the size of adoptive and
foster families as we limit the size of other care groups. For example, in many
states, family day care homes (services that care for young children in the
caregiver’s residence) are limited in the number of children to be cared for
and the age range of those children. In New Jersey, family day care providers
may not care for more than three children under a year of age, or more than
four children under two years of age, of whom no more than two may be under one
year. If one or more children under 6 are present as well as those younger
children, a second caregiver must be present as well as the primary caregiver. Interestingly,
with respect to the family described by Maggie Jones, the New Jersey guidelines
for family day care prohibit leaving children alone with an assistant under the
age of 18 except in an emergency, and forbids children under 16 from working so
many hours that schoolwork is affected--
whereas Jones’ article describes a daughter now 18 who has been driving
siblings to school and changing one child’s tracheostomy dressing, apparently
for some time.

Whatever the religious or personal motives for the
creation of megafamilies, it would seem that we already have a template for
limiting them. Like so many other issues, however, applying the template
requires political will, and acceptance of conflict with some adoptive
parents-- and, no doubt,some adoption
caseworkers.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

A new book, Festhaltetherapie:
Ein Pladoyer Gegen Umstritten Therapie…. (Holding Therapy: An Argument Against
Controversial Therapies) was published in 2013, and I thank Mrs. Alena
Bilkova for calling it to my attention. I hope to get in touch with the editor,
Dr. Ute Benz, but I haven’t managed this yet (maybe LinkedIn will do it?).

Festhaltetherapie
is a treatment that resembles American “rage-reduction therapy” and other
methods that use physical restraint of children in the belief that these
procedures have therapeutic effects on psychological problems. Unlike the “classic” American holding therapy, Festhaltetherapie (or, to give its Czech
abbreviation, TPO) does not hold the child in the therapist’s lap, use
provocative physical prods, or demand
that the child shout slogans about wanting to kill people. Festhaltetherapie involves a parent holding a child tightly while
the parent expresses feelings about the child and the child cries and struggles,
until both are exhausted. Young children are held on the lap facing the parent
(usually the mother), but larger children lie on the back with the mother
face-to-face on top of them, restraining their hands with her own. Festhaltetherapie is used with autistic
children and those who are oppositional by Jirina Prekopova, the Czech
proponent of this treatment, but her American counterpart, Martha Welch, now
uses her technique “Prolonged Parent-Child Embrace” for treatment of Reactive
Attachment Disorder (although she originally saw it as a treatment for autism).

In the 1980s, Prekopova and some German colleagues presented
some weak research purporting to give scientific support to the effectiveness
of Festhaltetherapie. Before her return
to the Czech Republic, however, Prekopova became acquainted with the spiritualist
family therapist Burt Hellinger, and her TPO approach now eschews scientific
evidence and bases the treatment entirely on the “flow of love” through
non-material channels. Prekopova has adopted Hellinger’s view of a
hierarchical, patriarchal family power structure that can be healthy only if
the child submits to parents completely--
and, by the way, if wives are submissive to husbands. Prekopova now
presents Festhaltetherapie as a “lifestyle”,
not a treatment, but others continue to promote it as a treatment for autism.

Dr. Ute Bemz and her colleagues wrote their book on Festhaltetherapie in protest against the
use of a treatment that is not only ineffective but painful and distressing to
children and to families. I have ordered the book from Amazon, but don’t have
it yet-- however, from material at http://www.psychosozial-verlag.de/catalog/product_info.php/products-id/2290
I can see a series of intriguing chapters on this little-discussed topic. Here
are some chapter titles, in my own clumsy translation (I am translating Festhaltetherapie as holding therapy):

“Power and authority as a therapeutic principle?
Methods and psychodynamics of holding”

“Possibilities and limits of parent-infant-toddler
psychotherapy”

“Holding therapy in the market of the education
industry”

“The attraction of holding therapy for people in the
helping professions with the example of occupational therapy”

“Long-term consequences of holding therapy”

“Unmasked pictures. Prekopova in action”

“Consequences and lengthy healing processes in
psychotherapy”

“Critical observations on a faulty theory from an
analytic perspective”

“ ‘We meant well. Is there trauma in holding
therapy?’ Experiences of holding therapy in professional and family contexts.”

“If parents only want the best. Conversation with a
mother who believed in holding therapy.”

Of course I can’t tell the contents of these
chapters from their titles, but it would appear that they include something I
have never seen published before, information from one or more parents who have
experienced holding therapy from the parental side. Although people concerned
about these restraint therapies ordinarily concentrate on the painful
experiences of the child undergoing treatment, as well as with the later
anxiety and post-traumatic phenomena reported by adults who were treated when
they were children, it seems probable that some parents carrying out holding
therapy may also be traumatized as they are instructed to ignore their child’s
patent distress.

I also look forward to reading the comments
connecting holding therapy with occupational therapy, a discipline that has
offered some extraordinarily helpful techniques for children but has also been prone
to theories with little empirical support.

Bernd Ahrbeck states: “Holding therapy is no safe
undertaking. Forcing of attachment on children who have at their disposal no
reliable attachment is full of risks. The probability is high that old traumas
will be reactivated and new ones established. There should be no illusions
about the authoritarian character of holding therapy, even if its proponents
are constantly declaring their good intentions and celebrating this treatment
as an especially humane method. Anyone who has seen the published videos of
holding therapy will not be able to avoid shuddering.

Michael Krentz writes: “The practice of holding
therapy, carried on with trivializing ideological-esoteric foundations or
camouflaged under veiled terms as ‘supportive and attachment-based pedagogy’ or
as ‘attachment holding’ or as ‘reconciliation therapy’, harms the psychological
development of the child over the long term.”

If anyone can correct my translations I would
appreciate it. I am not sure whether Gewalt
in this context should be translated as “abuse” rather than “power”.

Hana’s life in a family of nine children had been
ruled by the infamous book To train up a
child, by Michael and Debi Pearl, which advocates punishments such as
thrashing with plastic plumbing supply line from the age of four months (yes,
months). The punishments she experienced, which also included being confined in
small or isolated spaces and made to shower with the garden hose outdoors, were
inflicted for getting homework wrong, standing in the wrong place, cutting the
grass too short, and “sneaking” food (this last being a frequent theme in abuse
of foster and adopted children). Her
death from hypothermia occurred after hours without shelter in drizzly
40-degree F. weather; her adoptive mother, Carri Williams, no doubt was unaware
that a person does not have to literally freeze to death, but can die as a
result of lowered body temperature at temperatures far above the freezing
point. Death caused or facilitated by hypothermia has occurred in other similar
cases, like the death of the Russian adoptee Viktor Matthey (or, commonly, the deaths
of boaters who fall overboard in cold waters).

Kathryn Joyce’s article connects the Williams’s
adoptions, and the abuse of Hana and other children, with the parents’
religious beliefs. As Joyce has pointed out in The child catchers, a movement for adoption has in recent years
been part of American evangelical Christian thinking. In addition, some
fundamentalist religious groups have emphasized publications recommending parenting
that demanded children’s obedience and enforced it with physical punishment. This
tendency began with the Baby Wise
books in the 1990s (publications later strongly criticized because the rigid
regulation of early feeding had harmed some infants), and proceeded to approval
of the obedience-producing manual To train up a child (see http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2010/07/child-death-by-thousand-cuts-in.html
for another death associated with this book). The enforcement of child
obedience as the principle task of parenting dates back to Puritan times in the
United States, and belief in this value has always considered intense
punishment as regrettable but essential to save the child from danger of
hellfire. In most cases, however, the children do not die or even have severe
enough injuries that the parents would seek medical attention for them, so we
are not likely to hear of them-- and as
many of the children in question are
homeschooled, there are no teachers, and perhaps no near neighbors, to notice
chronic mistreatment.

Joyce also describes the connection between
fundamentalist Christian beliefs and multiple adoptions resulting in “mega-families”
with 20 or more children. The belief that the “Great Commission” of spreading
the Gospel requires adoption of children who would otherwise not be Christians
is clearly related to this phenomenon--
if a person believes it is a religious duty to take as many children as
possible, clearly only practical barriers will limit family size. As Joyce
points out in The child catchers, any
care deficits that may occur as a result of having too many children are
considered to be outweighed by the spiritual victories accomplished. But any
parent or child care provider can testify that having too many children to care
for makes it impossible to do a good job, or even to notice the needs of every
child. For this reason, state laws and guidelines set limits on the staff:child
ratio of day care centers in order to
facilitate good individual development. For whatever reason-- perhaps shared faith or personal
relationships—not all adoption organizations take these issues into
consideration, but instead cooperate with the creation of adoptive families too
large to care for effectively. (Yes, the children may help care for each other,
but they do not do the job that a committed adult can do with a small number of
children.)

I wonder, though, whether in addition to religious
beliefs, we may be seeing these “mega-families” formed as the result of a form
of emotional disturbance in the adoptive parents. It’s certainly clear that
excessive motivation toward some normal activities should be regarded as
pathological. Excessive eating and drinking, and “sex addiction”, interfere
with normal life and are reasons for psychological treatment. Hypersexuality
may even be a symptom of brain damage. Could there, then, be a pathological level
of the wish to have children that most (but certainly not all) people
experience? Is there some yet undescribed problem we might call “hyperparentalism”,
which leads to an inescapable, anxious yearning for more and more children, but
does not cause good care for the children when they arrive? If so, can we
detect this before adoption-- and can we
get adoption caseworkers to regard such urges as pathological rather than admirable?

I throw this idea out as a possible explanation of
part of the megafamily phenomenon. I know, of course, that there are plenty of
other reasons for this kind of behavior. These may include financial benefits
for foster care or adoption. There may be advantages of social respect and
honor for women whose religious and cultural milieu does not permit her to be
employed or to study toward professional qualifications. There may also be
advantages for husbands who would prefer for their wives to stay at home and be
as dependent as possible.

When these
benefits are mingled with religious beliefs, they seem to offer some explanation
of multiple adoptions, and even of cruel treatment. Nevertheless, I have to
wonder whether the explanation is complete without some consideration of the more
personal motives of adoptive parents who seek more children than they can care for,
and maltreat the ones they have.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

I am writing to ask you to retract or correct a
statement you made more than twenty years ago, a statement that I believe has
had the unfortunate effect of helping to continue the use of holding therapy as
a treatment for autistic children.

In 1992, you published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology (2[1]), an article entitled “Calming
effects of deep touch pressure in patients with autistic disorder, college
students, and animals” (on line at www.grandin.com/inc/squeeze.html).
In this article, you described your own gratification with the use of your
“squeeze machine”. You also spoke approvingly of the holding therapy for
autistic children recommended by Martha Welch in her book Holding Time, and because you were and are a respected figure in
the community of people concerned with autism, this approval no doubt carried a
good deal of weight. You did not mention a point that many have made since
then: that there is a world of difference between choosing to be “squeezed” in
a machine that you can control, and being physically restrained and shouted at
without being able to control the beginning or end of the experience. Holding
therapy, as performed by Martha Welch, Jirina Prekopova, and others, presents
the latter situation.

Many changes and revelations have occurred since
1992. The use of holding therapy has never been shown to be an effective treatment
for autism, despite some of the efforts of Prekopova and her German colleagues
in the 1980s. Practitioners of holding therapy, including Welch, have gradually
come to say that they are treating Reactive Attachment Disorder or oppositional
disorders rather than autism. Deaths and injuries from holding therapy have
been publicized.

A small number of adults have come forward to tell
of their distress during their treatment for autism using holding therapy. One
of these, a British man whom I will call Walter, has e-mailed me describing his
disturbing memories of the treatment for autism he received in the 1980s,
memories on account of which he is being evaluated for Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder. In talking about his treatment by a therapist in the north of
England, he said: “The first holding session was in her room when we went to
[town] to see her. It was lying side by side, me in the middle facing my mum.
Then at home my mam was on top of me holding my arms, in the hands-up position
while I lay on my back, but she never had her weight on top of me. I know its
not as bad as what I saw in the videos of Jirina with a mother lying on top of
her boy and even shaking his head, but it was bad enough for me with being
uncomfortable with forced touch, and having no freedom to scratch an itch or
wipe my eyes during crying. As a child
with unknown autism and aspergers syndrome, I had
insufficient vocabulary to explain my way out of this and felt trapped as to
why I reacted the way I did, so it felt horrible for a therapist to watch
telling me I’m angry all the time, it felt like she was playing with my
emotions as well. “ In another e-mail, Walter said, “Communication is harder
for autistic children and also with aspergers, and when in a [holding therapy]
position, it must be a bit like someone has had a stroke and knowing what they
want to say but just can’t get it out, that was how I felt. It was that feeling
of how do I tell my mum not to, or that she can’t hug or touch me because it
hurts without taking it the wrong way or thinking I’m being silly…” Walter’s
father put a stop to his holding therapy treatment after four sessions, and
Walter comments, “I recently sat and explained to my parents that this therapy
was like me being abused while this lady sat and watched me in a emotional
state, and they are now so sorry that this had happened and now see how
traumatic it really was, and unlike what it said in the book about the parents
not being tempted to feel sorry or guilty of it, well my parents did because they loved me so
much regardless of the way I was. I broke down and cried when I told them this,
and my mam came over to me sitting in the chair and, pleaded with her not to
touch me, and she didn’t as she now understands I am touch sensitive, which is quite
common among autistics.”

Walter’s treatment occurred many years ago, and it
would be easy to assume that no such practice exists today. Perhaps you, Dr.
Grandin, have assumed that the use of this method of treating autistic people
had gradually vanished. However, it is very clear that in the Czech Republic
Jirina Prekopova and her followers continue to do holding therapy and have much
popular support (as well as considerable professional antagonism). In 2006,
Henry Massie, writing in the newsletter of the Northern California Regional
Organization of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, described holding therapy as
“a new, effective psychosocial treatment for autism”. He referred to the use of
the method at the Mifne Center in Israel. In 2006, Stella Acquarone recommended
the method in her book Signs of autism in
infants (published by Karnac). Acquarine appears to be describing holding
for regulatory purposes at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1MwRuHhdIE.

And, of course, your 1992 statement remains on the
Internet and provides support for this non-evidence-based, implausible,
potentially harmful treatment. I hope that Walter’s description of his
experience and its aftermath will persuade you finally to speak out against
holding therapy, and to put your great influence to work against this and other
wrongly-conceived treatments for autism.

I hope everyone will understand that this research
does not make it possible for parents to assess their young baby’s typical or atypical
development by seeing whether they “make eye contact”, that is, engage in
mutual gazing for short periods with another person, or visually track another
person’s eyes. This study, valuable as it is, does not give guidelines for
evaluating a baby’s gaze in an everyday social setting. All babies, like all older persons, look at
eyes sometimes, at mouths sometimes, at other parts of the face sometimes—and away
from a person at other times. Whether they do “mutual gazing” with another
person depends to some extent on what the other person looks like or does,
whether the distance and illumination are favorable, whether the baby is tired,
etc. An important point made by Jones and Warren is that differences in eye-tracking
are not present at birth, when babies do not reliably look at eyes, but are
seen after two months, when typical development involves an increase in
attention to eyes so that by 6 months typically-developing babies look at eyes
as much as adults do.

In any case, the babies in the Jones and Klin study did not “make eye contact”; there was none to
be made, because the babies were watching a video of another person, not
engaging face-to-face with a real person who could look back at them. The
question was whether recordings of their eye movements showed that the babies
looked at the videorecorded eyes or at other parts of the face or the screen,
and how long their gaze lingered on a particular area. Typically-developing babies
begin to look at the eyes more and more as they mature from about 2 months to
about 6 months, but it appears that for babies who will later be diagnosed as
autistic, this developmental process is “derailed” during that period.

The Times report
quoted Warren Jones as saying that eye-tracking (following another’s eyes with
one’s gaze) is only one channel that may be related to autism. He proposed that
social communication through touch or
listening is probably similarly related to autism, but these processes are more
difficult to measure than eye movements. (This suggests, by the way, that a
treatment that increased eye contact might not necessarily affect autistic
development, because the atypical gaze may be only one symptom of a central
problem.)

Naturally, the concern with early diagnosis of
autism is associated with the hope that early intervention would get the “derailed”
social development back on track. The New York Times report included the suggestion that intensified or
pleasurable social experiences might be helpful if they were provided during
the possible sensitive period or window of opportunity that may be indicated by
the Jones and Klin study. Does this suggestion imply that parents of autistic
children have done something wrong, or failed to do something right? Does the
strong genetic factor at work in autism determine that these infants need
unusual care given by their parents, different care than is needed by more
typically-developing babies? How do the interactions
between genes and environment guide development?

There are several ways in which genes and
environment can interact. One of these, a passive interaction, means that the
environment directly affects development in different ways depending on a
person’s genetic make-up. For example, if
a genetic problem made a baby not very sensitive to social signals like
gaze, and if those signals needed to be experienced for good development, more
intense or noticeable signals might help development. This is an idea that has
been around for some time. Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Nobel Laureate in Medicine,
suggested that people working with
autistic children should wear masks with big eyes to get the children’s
attention. Some alternative treatments for autism have parents wear large
eyeglasses and hold objects beside their eyes when they offer the objects to
autistic children. There is no evidence that this is effective, though, so if
there is a gene-environment interaction in autism it may not be this kind, and
treatments that use these methods will probably not be helpful no matter how
early they are provided.

Gene-environment interactions may also be evocative.
This means that the genetic material causes the individual to act in ways that
make some experiences more likely to happen. This might mean that when
typically-developing babies pay attention to eyes, they attract adults to
socialize with them, and that socialization facilitates good development. If babies who will later be diagnosed as
autistic do not pay attention in that way, or do other things that attract
adult play and interaction, they might not receive social interactions that are
needed to facilitate development. In that case, treatment might involve helping
parents become more responsive to any cues the babies give, or more able to
find ways of interacting even though the baby doesn’t “give the signal”. This
might or might not need to happen during a particular early period, although
the Jones and Klin study seems to suggest that there are important changes
early on.

Gene-environment interactions can also be active.
This means that the genetic material causes the baby to do things that
naturally provide certain experiences--
like moving in ways that strengthen muscles and increase flexibility, or
preferring some foods over others. Children who find dancing or singing or
talking easy and fun will do those things over and over and get even better at
them as they actively seek these experiences. Toddlers with Williams syndrome
are said to seem to have a “hunger” for eye contact, and although they are initially
slow to talk they later become extremely sociable and communicative. If this were the case in autism, it may
be that typically-developing children are genetically determined to do things
like looking and imitating that encourage good development, and autistic
children lack that determinant. In that case, it would be a matter of a great
deal of work to determine what it was that babies typically did that gave them
the “right experiences”, and to figure out how such experiences could be given
to autistic children. Even then, it would have to be shown empirically that the
treatment was effective.

Finally, it’s possible that there is little or no
gene-environment interaction. The Jones and Klin finding may simply show a
developmental trajectory that is different for typical and autistic children
because of their genetic differences. The increasing differences between 2 and
6 months might, unfortunately, not indicate a sensitive period, but just result
from innate developmental patterns. In that case, early diagnosis might or
might not help interventions work.

There is a lot of other interesting work that Jones, Klin, and
others have published, and I hope to be able to comment on it soon.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

A day or two ago, I posted some comments on a study
published in Journal of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing by Karyn Purvis and colleagues. That study
claimed, on the basis of before-and-after tests of child characteristics, that
a day camp experience had a significant ameliorative effect on symptoms shown
by adopted children; I explained why the design of the study and the nature of
the treatment could not be used to draw this conclusion.

Now I find that Purvis and her colleague David Cross
had earlier published in Adoption
Quarterly another report about the effects of the day camp (“Improvements
in salivary cortisol, depression, and representations of family relationships
in at-risk adopted children utilizing a short-term therapeutic intervention”, 2006,
Vol. 10, pp. 25-43). In this study, the authors looked at 12 children whose age
range was not clearly stated (a younger group with a mean age of a little over
4 years, and an older group with a mean age a little over 10). These adopted
children had been in their adoptive homes for between 1.5 and 11 years, and had
been gathered through referrals from parent support groups and child and family
therapists. This is a tiny and variable group, and in fact it would be most
surprising if any clear results came out of a properly-done study.

Purvis and Cross used a measure of salivary cortisol
as an indicator of the children’s distress and arousal. They predicted that
there would be a reduction in cortisol levels associated with the camp
experience (although in fact in their brief literature review they noted a
paper showing lower cortisol levels for maltreated children, as well as a
number connecting high levels with stress). They measured salivary cortisol
during the week prior to camp and the week after camp, as well as on Mondays
and Wednesdays during the 5 day camp weeks.

Reporting the results of the cortisol measures,
Purvis and Cross state that although “salivary cortisol was measured three
times a day, only the morning data are show because there were no statistically
significant differences for the other measurement times (noon, afternoon)” (p.
34)[!]. They then present a table showing the results of t-tests comparing morning measurements for weeks 1, 3, and 5 to
pre-test salivary cortisol measures. Two of these, for weeks 1 and 5, were
significant at the .05 level. In addition, the table shows highly significant
differences between the three weekly measures and the post-test measure-- the post-camp cortisol reading being
significantly higher than the
measures during camp, and indeed rather higher than the pre-camp measure!

Words temporarily fail me as I look at this report,
which resembles an intentionally easy problem I might set as a present to weak
students on a research methods exam. But let’s soldier on. First: is it okay to
leave out of a table comparisons where there was no significant difference
found? No, Virginia, that is not okay, and in the trade we refer to it as “cherry-picking”.
The table as it stands makes it appear that there was a high proportion of
significant differences found whereas in fact there should have been ten comparisons
shown rather than six, and five significant differences out of those ten rather
than five out of six.

But hey, that still sounds like a lot, doesn’t it—five
out of ten? Sure, that’s how it sounds, but this is exactly the reason why a
study like this should use analysis of variance to examine all the comparisons
at the same time, rather than multiple t-tests.
Here’s the deal: using the .05 probability level, by definition 5 tests out of
100 will appear “significant” but do so by chance alone. With each additional t-test on a set of data, you increase
the probability of events appearing to indicate a significant difference but actually
occurring by chance. Analysis of variance avoids this problem, and that’s what
should have been done here.

Let’s also look at what the results seem to
indicate. Taking cortisol level as an indication of troubled mood, we see that
the children improved quickly as seen in weeks 1 and 3-- that their cortisol was significantly lower
at those measures than it had been before they started camp. By week 5,
however, although the cortisol reading is lower than at the pre-test, it is no
longer significantly lower. Did the treatment “work” quickly to begin with,
then “stop working”? And how is it that if this treatment is effective, the
post-camp cortisol readings are significantly higher than the readings taken
during camp, and somewhat higher than they were before the treatment began? Isn’t
a treatment supposed to have a longer-term effect than this?

Considering both the pre-and post-test design used
by Purvis and Cross, and the very peculiar set of differences presented to us,
I can only assume that we are seeing the effect of the confounding variables
natural to this type of design-- the
confounding variables that are the reason this design cannot be used to claim
that an intervention is an evidence-based treatment (EBT). Confounding
variables here could be as simple as the different circumstances under which
the cortisol sample was taken at home and at the camp, although there are many
other possibilities of the kind I discussed with respect to the more recent day
camp publication. The “scientific” study of cortisol levels gives no advantages
when the design is this weak, although, as Dr. Spock used to say about alcohol
rubs, it smells important.

Once again, it seems that a peer-reviewed journal’s
reviewers did not do their job, to the possible detriment of adoptive families
and children. The evidence here seems to be that use of this day camp intervention
may simply waste family resources and delay access to effective treatment.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

The Philadelphia Inquirer
this morning headlines a story “Parents challenge state ban on gay conversion
therapy” (Nov. 5, 2013; B1, B8). As many readers will know, in recent months New
Jersey and California both passed legislation prohibiting the use with minors of
conversion therapy, an intervention that purports to alter same-sex attraction
so that the treated person experiences heterosexual attraction and behaves
accordingly. Conversion therapy has been practiced both by a small number of
mental health professionals and by members of the clergy; the New Jersey
legislation applies only to licensed therapists.

The California law has been upheld in a federal
appeals court. There are presently two challenges to the New Jersey law, both
in federal courts. According to the Inquirer
article, one case has two licensed therapists among the plaintiffs. The second
involves parents who claim a violation of their constitutional rights by the
law that prevents them from seeking conversion therapy for their 15-year-old
son (by the way, it does not prevent them from “seeking treatment”, as the Inquirer says; they are free to seek
treatment that will help the son resist inappropriate impulses or will help him
come to terms with his developing sexuality). The parents argue that the law
violates their rights to free speech, freedom of religion, and equal protection
of the laws.

One of the lawyers representing these plaintiffs,
Demetrios Stratis, also argued that the law was based on faulty and incomplete
research, and pointed out that even the American Psychological Association
report, which opposed conversion therapy, agreed that the scientific basis was
weak. Stratis also stated his belief that reports of harm from the treatment
are inaccurate.

Is this correct? Was this law enacted without
sufficient scientific evidence to support it? As one who testified in favor of
the New Jersey law, I must say that the answer is probably “yes”-- but that the question is not nearly as simple
as it appears to be.

Much of the evidence I heard given was personal in
nature. Members of the LGBT community spoke of their terrible difficulties in
growing up as part of a rejected minority. A few spoke of undergoing conversion
therapy and of the distress they experienced. Members of fundamentalist
Christian groups spoke deploring the troubles and dangers of a life of same-sex
attraction, and argued that although the clergy might be able to do the
treatment, they needed real mental health professionals to handle tough cases.
A very small number of us addressed the nature and foundational beliefs of
conversion therapy. It would be quite inaccurate to say that the information
witnesses provided to the Assembly committee emphasized scientific evidence,
either about the nature of sexual orientation or of the effectiveness and
safety of conversion therapy. Although the committee presumably sought more
information elsewhere, the effect of testimony was probably to pit the strength of
one political group’s power against that of another.

Although I strongly support the New Jersey law, I
cannot claim that it is based on scientific evidence rather than political positions.
There is little scientific work examining the safety and effectiveness of conversion
therapy, and that fact raises one of the questions packed into the question
about the evidence for the law. Why is this the case? Why are we lacking an
evidence basis that would support arguments for or against conversion therapy?

A possible answer to this question-- and the answer that I think the plaintiffs in
these appeals want to imply-- is that
conversion therapy is an emerging psychotherapy.
This would mean that it is a treatment so new and so underutilized that it has
not yet been possible to collect the data that would allow us to evaluate it.
There are such therapies, and it would be quite inappropriate to claim that
laws should prohibit their use simply because of lack of evidence.

A second possible answer is that there is little
evidence about conversion therapy for two reasons. One is that practitioners of
the treatment do not believe such evidence is necessary and therefore have not
systematically collected outcome data. The other is that practitioners of
conventional treatments have regarded conversion therapy as not worth their
while to study. They have thought of it with a range of rejecting terms like
unconventional, complementary-and-alternative, fringe, New Age, or snake oil-- although they might not have spent much time
considering how or why conversion therapy should be classified in one of these
ways.

In my opinion, conversion therapy is best classified
as an alternative psychotherapy. I
offer this term to describe a treatment that has three characteristics: first,
it lacks a clear evidence basis; second, it has been demonstrated to do harm,
in which I would include unnecessary emotional pain or burdens for the client;
and third, it is implausible, or incongruent with established information about
personality, development, or mechanisms of emotional change. Unlike emerging
therapies, there may be very good reasons for prohibition of alternative
psychotherapies, especially prohibition of their use with minors.

Let’s look at conversion therapy and see how it fits
into the category of alternative psychotherapy. We have already established the
lack of a clear evidence basis supporting the effectiveness of the
treatment-- this in fact forms part of
the foundation of the legal appeals. In addition, testimony has established
harm to clients in the form of distress and emotional burdens which appear to
me to be beyond the level to be expected from a psychotherapy.

Our remaining question is about plausibility—the extent
to which a treatment agrees with or contradicts established information. We can
look at conversion therapy’s plausibility both in terms of its assumptions
about the causes of homosexual attraction and about the methods for changing
such attraction.

All the present evidence states that same-sex
orientation as part of personality (rather than as a situational factor, such
as a long prison term, or as culturally determined) is dependent on the
individual’s genetic make-up. This means
that the primary factor causing same-sex attraction is in every cell of the
body throughout life. This does not mean that the individual must act on the
attraction—obviously neither heterosexuals nor homosexuals act on every
attraction they feel! But it does mean that the orientation is an intrinsic
part of that person’s constitution.

Conversion therapy, incongruently, attributes
same-sex orientation of males to a failure of a loving attachment relationship
with a father. Such an assumption is implausible in the light of what is known
about causes of sexual orientation. Heterosexuals do not prefer the opposite
sex because they had good relationships with a same-sex parent, but because of
much more basic factors. Some readers may remember the blundering work of John
Money in the 1970s; he recommended that a baby boy whose penis had been badly
damaged in a circumcision accident should be castrated and raised as a girl. In
spite of hormone treatment and constant reinforcement by affectionate and
concerned parents, the boy later abandoned the hormone treatment, returned to
living as a male, fell in love with a woman, and married. The same considerations
apply to same-sex attractions.

Conversion therapy is also incongruent with
established knowledge about development in its use of the attachment concept. Rather
than following conventional theory and research about the natural history of
emotional attachment, conversion therapy has simply picked up the views of
another alternative psychotherapy, so-called Attachment Therapy. Attachment
Therapy, which is also potentially harmful and without supportive research
evidence, which assumes that emotional attachment is caused by experiences of
dependency and by prolonged eye contact, and which posits that where attachment
has failed it can be produced in older persons by experiences of physical
restraint and forced submission. Conversion therapy also uses methods that
attempt to re-enact through physical restraint the experiences that are
erroneously believed to be the causes of attachment-- at the same time that its practitioners
erroneously assume that attachment is related to same-sex or opposite-sex
attraction. (Bizarrely, this produces a
situation in which a young man lies in the arms of an older male therapist in
order to be persuaded not to be attracted to males.)

Conversion therapy is thus clearly implausible, as
well as being without an evidence basis and potentially harmful. It is an
alternative psychotherapy, and that is why conventional mental health
professionals do not study or practice it.

But should all alternative psychotherapies be
prohibited by law? This is tempting, but would seem to be a Draconian measure
that would violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments, if treatment of adults
were included. Minors, however, need and deserve the full protection of the law
against ineffective, unsafe treatments, whether medical or psychological. I
hope the appeals court in New Jersey will act to provide that protection
against conversion therapy.

Monday, November 4, 2013

Having had many arguments with people who promote
unsupported theories, I have to state approval for those who go through the
tedious work of collecting empirical evidence that can support or disconfirm a
hypothesis. However, those who have collected evidence should not think they
are finished with the job. They must still analyze the evidence and draw
logical conclusions-- and, if in the
course of this work it appears that they did not design the study well to begin
with, they need to start over. Otherwise, conclusions and support for theory will
go beyond what the evidence shows, and readers may be deceived into accepting
conclusions when they should not do so.

A case in point is a recent publication by Karyn
Purvis, L.Brooks McKenzie, David Cross, and Erin Becker Razuri, in the [theoretically]
peer-reviewed Journal of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing (“A spontaneous emergence of attachment
behavior in at-risk children and a correlation with sensory deficits”, 2013, 26(3), pp. 165-172). The flaws in this
article raise many questions about the efficacy of peer review-- although I suppose that if a reviewer is
really at a peer level with a confused author, we can hardly expect the
reviewer to notice problems.

The Purvis et al paper discusses a therapeutic day
camp experience for a group of children recruited from local support groups and
therapists (in other words, a group whose parents believed this camp was a good
idea and likely to have positive effects on the children). Data were collected
from 18 children whose ages ranged from 3 to 14 years (in other words, a small
group with such a wide age range that it is difficult to know either how they
could all have been given the same treatment, or how different treatments would
have been chosen). All had been adopted and “many” (but how many, or which,
remains unclear) were institutionalized as infants or toddlers. These children
and adolescents were tested on a range of tests-- including the much-rejected Randolph Attachment
Disorder Questionnaire and the questionable Beech Brook Attachment Disorder Checklist-- that looked at social and emotional
capacities and at sensory abilities as noted by parents and by occupational
therapists.

Testing was done before and after the camp
experience. In other words, the design of this study was at the low level of
evidence characteristic of the pre- and post-treatment design. This design
admits multiple confounding variables into the situation, so that upon
completion it is impossible to tell whether a treatment or some other factor(s)
caused an outcome. In this case, Purvis
and her colleagues concluded that the treatment itself caused various
improvements in the children’s behavior and abilities. They did not discuss the
possibility that parents who believe that their children are receiving a
helpful treatment may themselves change both their responses to and their
evaluations of the children. They ignored the fact that parents as well as
children in this study might have been directly affected, as each camp day
began with direct questions to the parents in the children’s presence: “May I
be the boss of your child while you are gone?” and “If your child asks for a
hug today, may I give them a hug?” These questions communicated to both parent
and child beliefs about the importance of the parent in the child’s life and
positive attitudes about the relationship between the child and the staff
member. Purvis et al also neglected to consider that 6 weeks of camp experience,
including interactions with a college student assigned to be the child’s buddy,
could make a difference to children’s experience in the camp situation and
therefore to the impact of that experience on behavior at home. These
confounding variables could well be responsible for the reported emergence of
attachment behaviors; it’s notable, by the way, that there was no measure of
reduced attachment behaviors, which might well be expected and appropriate for
the older children.

There is much more to be said about the design and
implementation of the study, particularly about the statistical analysis.
However, I would like to move on to comment on certain assumptions made by
Purvis and her colleagues and often shared by occupational therapists and some
educators. These have to do with the function of the vestibular system and the
effects of stimulating the system. As it happens, I did my Ph.D. thesis on the
effects of vestibular stimulation on other sensory processes, and would be the first
to concede that when there is very little sensory information to use, strong
and directed vestibular stimulation influences perceptual judgments. However,
outside the laboratory, there are few situations where there is a minimum of
information (e.g., being in the dark) and directed vestibular stimulation like accelerated
rotation in one direction. Most experience of vestibular stimulation is highly
variable and undirected, and it happens literally all the time. The vestibular
system is always affected by the pull of gravity unless a person is in outer
space, and it is simultaneously affected by every movement of head and body or
head alone, self-produced or caused by the environment. Infants and young children like and are interested and soothed
by forms of vestibular stimulation, just as they are by rhythmic sound, touch,
or changing visual stimulation.

It is certainly true, as Purvis says, that “each
time a child is picked up, the fluid in the … semicircular canal shifts,
creating what has become known as vestibular input” (p. 170). But this also
happens every time the child turns the head or the whole body, turns over in
sleep, walks, jumps up and down, crawls, changes sitting position, etc., etc. There are three semicircular canals on each
side of the head, each specialized to respond to a particular direction of rotation,
and there are also gravitational receptors that send messages along the auditory-vestibular
nerve even if there is no rotational head movement. It is inconceivable that a
living person existing in a gravitational field could be without vestibular
activity. There is no evidence that extra vestibular activity causes better
development, or indeed that therapeutic additions give more than a slight
increment to children’s self-produced vestibular activity. These are beliefs
that have been promoted without evidence by people like Ayers and Wilbarger,
whom Purvis cites. (Incidentally, isn’t it a bit inconsistent that we want these
children to be less active, when their activity gives them vestibular
stimulation? Or is it that only the kind therapists give is any good?)

As the Reuters study a few weeks ago, showed us,
adoptive families sometimes need extra help. But it seems to me a shame that a
journal has published an article that states unsupported conclusions about the
kinds of help that may actually be effective. Readers, please do take care
about accepting some of these ideas! There are evidence-based treatments that
can be of real help.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.